Please stop peddling this horrible experience as a form of a valid backup. A process that requires full manual interaction and requires you to know ahead of time when your phone will break or be stolen is not a useful backup process.
They're pretty bad. You can't specify where the backup goes, so if you are running low on storage space (eg if you have a lot of photos or videos to back up) and add an SD card, tough luck because you can't save there. The best you can do is manually export your media (also without any choice over where it goes) and then manually move it to the SD card to make space on your internal storage. They say this is for security but if an attacker is in a position to export your backup, they are already in your signal account.
Same story with the PIN signal requires if you haven't used it in a few hours. It's the same as your phone PIN and there isn't anywhere you can change it, so it's just security theater.
> Same story with the PIN signal requires if you haven't used it in a few hours. It's the same as your phone PIN and there isn't anywhere you can change it, so it's just security theater.
This is not the Signal PIN. It sounds like you have the Screen Lock option enabled.
I see it, but it just looks like it uses internal storage. So far as I know, there's no Drive File Stream/Dropbox sync for Android, so you'd still lose your shit if you weren't manually backing them up somewhere.
I doubt that's a habit many people will develop for a setting they didn't even know existed.
It's not going to help a casual user but I solved the problem by putting the Signal backup in a Syncthing shared folder. It's been a workable solution at least 2 phone swaps now
My cousin comment [1] provides a bit more detail, but this is not available on iOS/iPadOS despite Apple allowing apps to save files to the filesystem and many other apps supporting this for years now.
There are no backups available on the iPhone/iPad app, only a device-to-device transfer while setting up a new device assuming your previous device and new device are both iPhones/iPads. This is despite support for apps storing files to the filesystem that was added some years ago now, and many other apps on those platforms supporting backups of custom file formats (or JSON, etc.).
Backups have existing for quite some time: settings -> chats -> backups
update: only on android. turns out there are quite a few caveats for backup. See https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007059752-Ba...
Please stop peddling this horrible experience as a form of a valid backup. A process that requires full manual interaction and requires you to know ahead of time when your phone will break or be stolen is not a useful backup process.
Eh? My Signal auto-backups every night to a device folder which I then replicate off with Syncthing. How is that requiring "full manual interaction"?
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They're pretty bad. You can't specify where the backup goes, so if you are running low on storage space (eg if you have a lot of photos or videos to back up) and add an SD card, tough luck because you can't save there. The best you can do is manually export your media (also without any choice over where it goes) and then manually move it to the SD card to make space on your internal storage. They say this is for security but if an attacker is in a position to export your backup, they are already in your signal account.
Same story with the PIN signal requires if you haven't used it in a few hours. It's the same as your phone PIN and there isn't anywhere you can change it, so it's just security theater.
> Same story with the PIN signal requires if you haven't used it in a few hours. It's the same as your phone PIN and there isn't anywhere you can change it, so it's just security theater.
This is not the Signal PIN. It sounds like you have the Screen Lock option enabled.
https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007059792-Si...
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I see it, but it just looks like it uses internal storage. So far as I know, there's no Drive File Stream/Dropbox sync for Android, so you'd still lose your shit if you weren't manually backing them up somewhere.
I doubt that's a habit many people will develop for a setting they didn't even know existed.
It's not going to help a casual user but I solved the problem by putting the Signal backup in a Syncthing shared folder. It's been a workable solution at least 2 phone swaps now
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My cousin comment [1] provides a bit more detail, but this is not available on iOS/iPadOS despite Apple allowing apps to save files to the filesystem and many other apps supporting this for years now.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39445286
I don't see that option in Settings > Chats on my iPhone. What device are you using?
Nope. Latest version.
Backup functionality was removed in the latest version?
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But there are backups available in signal app
There are no backups available on the iPhone/iPad app, only a device-to-device transfer while setting up a new device assuming your previous device and new device are both iPhones/iPads. This is despite support for apps storing files to the filesystem that was added some years ago now, and many other apps on those platforms supporting backups of custom file formats (or JSON, etc.).
https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007059752-Ba...
I'm currently facing this issue.
The process to transfer the history is to scan a QR code displayed on the new phone by the app on the old phone.
Well, the camera on my old iPhone is broken. The phone has 3 other working cameras, but I cannot switch which one the app uses…